Wednesday, 04 April 2007

Spain's parliament
passed a law on Thursday that will give universities greater autonomy in
faculty hiring but that critics say will foment academic inbreeding, long
a controversial feature of Spanish higher education.

The new law is a
modification of the Organic Law of Universities, enacted in 2001, which
required candidates for tenured positions to pass nationally administered,
competitive examinations in their fields.

Those examinations will now be
replaced by a system in which universities can grant permanent teaching
jobs to anyone accredited by national commissions composed of university
professors. Accreditation will be based on an evaluation of a candidate's
curriculum vitae, and there will be no limit on the number of accredited
candidates. By contrast, the previous system qualified only enough
candidates to fill the available number of permanent positions.